On February 16, the first part of Kanye West’s documentary, Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, will be available to watch on Netflix. On Friday night, the director duo held a screening of the film for an audience in Los Angeles, with Kanye himself in attendance. This comes after he requested final edit approval over the documentary earlier this month. He also demanded that Drake narrate the film, but both requests were turned down.
At the screening, Kanye took a moment to speak about Black Future Month, a term he coined to replace Black History Month. “When you have people next to you that believe in you, and a community, and that the community sticks together, that’s the way that we can protect each other,” Kanye told the crowd. “Out here in Hollywood a lot of times, I got my man DaBaby right here, people try to cancel us and we all run away from each other.” He continued, “We not talking to each other, not communicating, and that’s why on Black Future Month we stood up and said, ‘We got stand next to each other and we ain’t gonna let each other go when someone brings up one mistake that someone did.’”
Later on in his speech, Kanye also spoke about his “mistakes” and why he’s open with them.
“When y’all see me doing certain things that y’all wouldn’t expect us to do, and y’all want me to step back and be a house***a, that’s not my position. My position is to make what y’all might think are mistakes in public, so I can show you that that ain’t no red line, that ain’t no real wall. That’s just a smokescreen, and it’s for us to take this. We on labels we don’t own, play for basketball teams we don’t own. The time is now. I got offered $100 million by Larry Jackson to put Donda on Apple, but I ain’t never got a meeting with Tim Cook. So it ain’t about the money, it’s about our power and out respect collectively. So I be saying stuff that people try to remind me in Black History Month that people got killed for. But this is Black Future Month.
You can watch Kanye’s speech in the video above.